We live in a world flooded by brands, emerging startups, and curious consumers, which has consequently led to exposure towards an enormous amount of advertisements. India has seen an addition in the number of startups and is strengthening its position as one of the largest startup ecosystem in the world. To counter the ever increasing competition, brands embark upon rigorous marketing activities. Henceforth, it has become necessary for brands to keep looking for newer and effective ways to cut through the clutter.

In the light of which, traditional marketing methods and innovative guerilla marketing tactics emerged as the go-to approach for all marketing needs. But in recent times, digital marketing has clearly held precedence. Marketers have used and overused search engine and social media marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing but are still hungry for newer methods of persuasion. While user experience is not a new phenomenon, marketers often tend to overlook it during devising and executing modern digital marketing strategies. The truth is user experience bridges the gap between the major marketing efforts and the product itself.

By all means, people like to access the internet for a variety of reasons: to look for answers on the Search Engine, online shopping, browsing through products, book tickets, or to simply socialize. In the execution on all of these tasks, the quality of an individual's online experience makes a strong impact.

User Experience in Digital Marketing

In the process of formulating a digital marketing strategy, a marketer wants to ensure that his ads, landing pages and calls to action are relevant and lead to conversion. Marketing doesn’t include much of product creation but quite a lot of conception in terms of landing pages, email marketing campaigns, PPC campaigns, blog posts. For creating campaigns that convert, applied principles of UX such as visual grammar, language and typography, narrative design must be used.

While interacting with end users, the users must feel as if the email or landing page they are interacting with is personalized, instead of a chunk of clever marketing automation. While running PPC campaigns, the landing page which is a specially designed webpage whose main goal is to generate sales or capture leads should be optimized to produce desirable results. Landing Page Optimization is a subset of Conversion Rate Optimization, a UX process to convert website visitors to conversions.

This leads us to believe that UX aids in reaching the full potential of a digital marketing strategy and is pivotal to its success.

Now let us look at a few examples where UX has played an important role in the digital marketing strategy.

How Swiggy has revolutionised your food ordering experience

The Problem

Before the outset of food ordering and delivery companies like Swiggy and Zomato in India, the food ordering experience mainly consisted of calling the familiar nearby restaurant, waiting impatiently for the food to arrive and limited options of payment. Chances are the delivery guy might be misguided and may encounter problems locating your house due to lack of GPS.

The Solution

Consequently, Swiggy was inspired by the very thought of providing a complete food ordering and delivery solution from the best neighbourhood restaurants to the urban foodie. It is all about delivering a premium ‘user experience’ by keeping the customers’ needs foundational. Swiggy operates through a desktop site, M-site and a mobile application. Swiggy promises each customer lightening fast delivery, live order tracking, diversified payment methods and exceptional customer service.

Source: Swiggy

The role of UX

Building a website is the most crucial part of a brand’s digital marketing strategy especially when the service is hosted wholly online. A good website is responsible for the success of other aspects of a digital marketing campaign such as SEO, CRO, PPC and Analytics. UX plays an important role in the website development. Swiggy’s website loads fast and is incredibly simple to use and navigate. The website reflects the brand’s youthfulness and warmth, in the aesthetic design i.e. colour scheme, logo and humanistic language.

Furthermore, live order tracking is made possible through GPS tracking which is nothing but an effort towards providing a high-quality user experience. All of these are a culmination of extensive user research and evaluation, a thoughtfully designed digital marketing strategy that has undisputedly kept user experience at the heart of its overall marketing approach.

How Kotak 811 app streamlined the account opening process

The problem

People prevalently say that there are three sorts of nuisances they try to stay away from as much as possible: a visit to the hospital, trips to the police station and drifting helplessly in a lawyer’s office. But there’s yet another stressful errand people wish was effortless – Opening a bank account. From the form filling, documentation, verification to the multiple rounds of the bank, opening a bank account is a trauma in itself.

The Solution

In order to solve this issue and simplifying the said experience, Kotak came up with a new age banking app that made the process of bank account opening easy for customers of all the strata of the society. With a utilitarian and human-centered design and approach, TECHVED Consulting managed to break new grounds by providing a user-centric platform to open bank accounts using their online identity.Kotak 811 is a one-stop app for all the banking needs keeping in mind the core requirements of the users.

Source: Kotak 811 App

The role of UX

The Kotak 811 app embodies an intuitive interface and provides a seamless experience, which matches the brand’s vision of being the most trusted and preferred bank. The app lets its users open a savings account using their online identity and also provides other facilities such as booking tickets, applying for a loan etc. thereby enriching user’s overall experience. This is achieved by encompassing all aspects of end user’s interaction with services and the product.

Digital first approach along with process complexities posed as a challenge which was solved skillfully for the culturally disparate audience by TECHVED Consulting.“Kotak 811 app turned out to be a huge success in terms of app downloads. Moreover, due to the efforts of TECHVED Consulting, Kotak saw a huge rise in the number of conversions and the overall customer acquisition’’, says Neha Modgil, the Chief UX Strategist at TECHVED Consulting. The kind of response that the app received even left the TECHVED team ecstatic.

According to Andrew Kucheriavy, Founder and CEO of Intechnic, a leading UX Consultancy, “In the end, humanizing UX comes down to recognizing that you are doing business with individuals. Remembering that there is a consumer at the other end of the device will help the financial industry design products that will meet the needs of the people who will ultimately use them.”

Evidently, humans are intuitive beings, and it seems that visual searching will cater to their ever thriving need for instant gratification in the oversaturated digital world that gets busier by the day. As a result, user experience should not be an optional indulgence, but instead, be given paramount consideration in the conception of your digital marketing campaigns.

So give UX all the attention it deserves and invest in improving the user experience for your digital marketing strategies to work for you.